All Things For Good

Tag Archives: Adam

Growing up I believed in myths. On Christmas Eve, our family huddled up in front of the evening news to see how Santa’s trip from North Pole was going. The radar’s flashing reindeer got us excited to set out milk and cookies as we awaited the arrival of jolly Old Saint Nick.

On Easter morning, my sister and I hustled to the window to see if we could find paw prints from the Easter Bunny so we could know which way he hopped after filling our baskets with candy. And a loose tooth was always followed by hopes that the Tooth Fairy would leave a stack cash in the middle of the night.

Most children believe in some type of myths. And most of us, as we grow up, learn to leave our myths behind. We get smarter. We become more educated. We see behind the curtain, as it were. It is a mark of maturity to discern between what is true and what is merely a story.

There are some things however that are not myth, even if they are a bit mysterious. One of these is what the Bible teaches about the first man, Adam. The Bible presents Adam as a real, historical, man from whom all other people descended. In Acts 17:26 Paul said “[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth.”

Holding to Adam’s historicity is essential for many reasons. For instance, it means that all people, regardless of ethnicity or cultural background, have the same nature and dignity. We’re all made in God’s image and we all have the same problem of sin. There may be many reasons we divide, but we all find unity in the same family, descended from Adam.

If this isn’t true then the door is wide open for certain groups to justify racism or elitism of one culture or ethnicity over another. Now, most people who deny Adam’s historicity wouldn’t advocate racism, but they undermine the foundational Biblical teaching that guards against it.

But affirming Adam’s historical existence isn’t just a historical, scientific, or anthropological issue, it’s a Gospel issue. Romans 5:12-21 clearly portrays Adam as the representative head of natural man in whom all people are condemned because of his sin.

If Adam is made out to be a myth, then the analogy of Christ’s work breaks down and we are left with Adam merely being an example to avoid and Jesus being an example to emulate. This is a far cry from what the Bible teaches. As Dr. Albert Mohler says, “Jesus didn’t come to improve our evolutionary line, He came to redeem sinners.”

The Bible begins with the account of God creating the world which is followed by a fall that came through the sin of Adam (Gen. 1-3; Rom. 5:12). If we dismiss that event as myth, then the dominoes of what the Scriptures teach us about God, His revelation to us, our sin nature, redemption in Christ, and the resurrection from the dead begin to tumble as well.

The doctrine of a historical Adam is an extraordinarily important issue that demands our attention. As I prepared to teach Romans 5:12-21 (which might be one of the toughest and amazing texts in the Bible) I spent some extra time revisiting the historical Adam debate. Below are some of the resources that a few friends helped me compile. I commend this study to you as a means of not only believing in the first Adam, but even more importantly, the second Adam, Jesus Christ who died and rose to give life for all those who will believe.